The government has restrictions on our labor market, so the US doesn't have a laissez-faire labor market. From what I have seen, no NIL money comes from student fees or anything government-backed. NIL money comes from collectives not directly associated with the school or from direct contracts between a player and a vendor. The unpaid job of school is the part that I've argued will eventually separate sports from the schools. The other argument is that the education side is compensated with the scholarship. They were students before they were athletes. The scholarships are the compensation provided for the academic side of the transaction. The new NIL world is how many will get paid for their athletic labor and their image. Right now, over 450k college athletes are receiving some level of NIL money. So it is pretty much like any business: you try to hire away the best employees from another business. The main difference is that you are hiring your employees for two jobs, 1 academic where they are compensated with a scholarship, and 1 athletic where they are paid by NIL.appvette wrote: ↑Mon Apr 01, 2024 11:16 pmIt might be a labor market, but it's not a laissez-faire free market. You have institutions trying to attract labor, but the funds used to pay for it comes from student fees that are mandatory, funded by government backed, subsided loans. The money also comes from donations and tax money (but not at every place). And the labor is also required to do another unpaid job (school) and meet academic standards but those standards are different for each place. And each laborer is only allowed to "work" for about 5 years. So, it is a clunky hybrid of a market that is like no other. We can't just pretend that this is like Microsoft and Apple bidding for the best software engineers.appdaze wrote: ↑Mon Apr 01, 2024 6:45 pmSo, the labor use a company to get work experience on their resume so they can jump to a company that pays more but wants them to have work experience. Hmmmm. Some companies can pay workers more than others for the same jobs. The companies use the labor to "win" profits for their investors. I know y'all are having a meltdown and refuse to see this as what it is....a labor market....but it is, and pretending it's anything other than that is just silly at this point. Accept it for what it is and decide whether or not you want to like it or hate it, but stop pretending it's something it's not. Athletes should have been under contract by the time the 1980s rolled around and college sports really started to make money. The market would have already sorted itself out, and schools at all levels would have already adjusted, and we would all be cheering on our teams. Instead, the billionaire/millionaire powers that be hung onto the BS concept of an amateur athlete for decades longer. They sold the farce well, and many fans still believe in it.
It will take a good decade for this to work itself out, but it will. It has one of two pathways to take. The players become contracted workers for the school or sports fully separate from the schools, and the schools and the teams create licensing contracts with each other to use their name and likeness to keep the connections, logos, etc going. I think the latter will eventually happen with football and basketball.
You had the luck of going to a small regional school instead of an SEC team.
Love it or hate it, here we are.
This two-job split is why sports will eventually split from the universities and simply represent them in name and likeness through licensing agreements. As of now the schools would have difficulty signing athletes to general contracts as the contract money would be coming from third-party sources in the collectives. So if Apple hired employees but a tech collective paid their salaries, that's what it would look like currently, which, of course, wouldn't work for long because those collectives will start trying to dictate what their benefactors do on the job. It's not going to end well for the universities, but this is a reckoning decades in the making that could have been solved decades ago, but greed wins the minds of those in power.
